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Comcast Has 30 Days To 'Fess Up About P2P Throttling
negRo_slim writes with some welcome news from Ars Technica: "Comcast has 30 days to disclose the details of its 'unreasonable network management practices' to the Federal Communications Commission, the agency warned Wednesday morning as it released its full, 67-page Order. As FCC Chair Kevin Martin said it would, the Commission's Order rejects the ISP giant's insistence that its handling of peer-to-peer applications was necessary. 'We conclude that the company's discriminatory and arbitrary practice unduly squelches the dynamic benefits of an open and accessible Internet,' the agency declares." And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits.
What is the FCC going to do...Send another strongly worded letter?
Seriously, I want to see something actually happen for once.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
This type of throttling seems like it could be a real problem for Video On Demand applications, since suddenly slowing down your connection when you're streaming video could result in some pretty lousy viewing experiences.
Since Comcast itself seems like one of the companies poised to go into Video On Demand in a big way, this strategy seems like shooting themselves in the foot. Sure, they could have it throttle only if it's not Comcast's VOD, but then they run into the same issue with the FCC that they currently have with the P2P throttling.
I don't see how Comcast can do real content-agnostic throttling without screwing with its own content offerings. I guess that's the problem with being a bandwidth provider and a content provider at the same time.
for instance. The minute Starbucks stock stopped earning gobs of money, the greedy investors got cold feet and ditched their shares. What we need to do to battle Comcast is not to go through the FCC, but to scare the investors. We know we can't convince subscribers to give up the service, so we should hit them in the ball sack.
pay based on how much bandwidth you use- say 25 cents a gig + 10$/month for the connection its self- that way it regulates its self. you use more, you pay more and it doesn't matter what kind of data it is. the isps get more $ for more traffic they get and consumers don't get throttled nor do those who don't use much pay truckloads for the privilage of just getting online. [in fact data use would somewhat be encourageable by isps because they'd make more] it works for utilities like water, gas, electric etc why not here too?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I'm sorry, but asking a government run entity to enforce the good nature of a free an open internet society is the WRONG way to go. If you are unhappy with Comcast service, or how they manage their network, you have the right, the capitalistic obligation as a consumer to vote with your wallet. Asking the G-man to step in and make the nasty corporation deliver you a different product is a bad precedent here. Most will bicker and complain that "but there isn't any competition in my area", my response is: start your own ISP! That's the great thing about this country, if you dont like how someone else runs their business, you can always try to improve upon it. Hey, you might even succeed and make a few bucks -- that is if pencil pushers up in washington don't force a ton of regulation down on you, driving your costs up before you even roll out services.
They're not just throttling P2P. At a company that will remain nameless, we caught Comcast RST-throttling HTTPS traffic generated by our business software.
Said company is nameless because management doesn't want to expose what Comcast is up to. Says it makes them look bad.
pay based on how much bandwidth you use- say 25 cents a gig + 10$/month for the connection its self- that way it regulates its self. you use more, you pay more and it doesn't matter what kind of data it is. the isps get more $ for more traffic they get and consumers don't get throttled nor do those who don't use much pay truckloads for the privilage of just getting online. [in fact data use would somewhat be encourageable by isps because they'd make more] it works for utilities like water, gas, electric etc why not here too?
Because every other ISP in the area is offering "UNLIMITED!" bandwidth - no one wants to be the one advertising limited, even if the unlimited really is limited.
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Also, since net neutrality is not the law, that sort of throttling might even be legal.
Well I'm not a lawyer nor American...But due to their size, can't it be considered as unfair practices against the competition? (other VOD providers?)
How can I put Time Warner in their place? What data do I need to collect? Are there law firms I should contact with the data who would be likely to pursue a class action lawsuit? Paying to be abused like this is outrageous.
I'd hate to consider the financial consequences of getting recruited into a botnet. Could you imagine finding out that you have a virus when you receive a $200+ cable bill?
greed@All_Evils:~#
Why would that be bad? It is the selective disruption of "certain" protocols and sites that is the biggest problem with Comcast. If they implemented some sort of FWQ (Fair-Weight Queuing) system like the one that is built into IOS, then it wouldn't care what the traffic was, just that you had emptied your bucket, (sent your allotted amount of packets) and had to wait until everyone else got to do the same until you went again.. That strikes me as being about as fair as you could be. The problem Comcast is going to run into is when they have oversubscribed their service, and users start complaining about they're downloads speeds not being what is advertised, and then moving to a competitor.
I would have no problem with this, just like I would not have a problem with a company saying "You have X you can download a month, then your limited to 512k/s" or something. At least they are not blocking, and at least they are honest, and you can plan for it.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Instead of squelching P2P traffic, kill all the worms, viruses and botnets... I've been trying to tell them how to do it with their existing equipment for many years now.
I'd estimate around 80% of Comcast's bandwidth is malicious packets, based on my firewall logs. Hire somebody competent - by offering a decent wage - and they can kill all that crap off and everybody wins.
But Comcast is so incredibly cheap and technically incompetent they are going after their best customers instead. If it weren't for their geographic monopoly they'd die off like the dinosaurs - Oh, wait, look here, I personally know over a dozen people who've switched to FiOS because of Comcast's craptacular service, how about that!
I actually started experiencing this about two months ago, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I'd be downloading a torrent, even with encryption, and suddenly me entire connection would be throttled to no more then 5kb/sec down, as well as terrible latency that made any online game absolutely unplayable. It was terrible. Stopping the torrent fixed it after 10-15 minutes or so, but as I said, it was the last straw. I have since switched to SBC Global (owned by AT&T I think?) and get 6mbit down and .6 up, as opposed to comcast's advertised 10/1. Overall though, it's actually faster, because it isn't randomly throttled when I try to download even a legit torrent. SBC's service also has yet to disconnect for more then a minute or two -- whereas comcast was out for at least 24 hours of every month. Comcast's service is absolutely terrible, and they've already lost at least this customer because of it.
So it is all well and good that people think this is about torrent and p2p, but I have seen the browser experience degraded also. And after enough resets, some things fail. I hate that. I have no other choice but to remain with comcast as the alternative to my 16Mb broadband is lousy DSL at 1.5Mb. Those are my only choices, except for satellite and I cannot do that.